Mechatronics: from minivans that predict crashes to unmanned battlefield rovers

Remember the Subaru ad about how its cars "transfer power from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip"?  Behind and beyond that jingle is an emerging field of engineering described by technical terms like mechatronics and agile vehicle dynamics.

Foxhound Vehicle. Courtesy UK Ministry of Defense.

The field seeks to design intelligent vehicles that adjust power distribution to the wheels, suspension stiffness and traction control with extreme speed in the face of changing road conditions. When perfected, such "agile" vehicles will make proactive decisions to avert crashes as the wheels begin to spin.

Systems that transfer power to the gripping wheels are also a must for vehicles meant to operate on loose soil for farming, construction, emergencies or military operations. Agile, unmanned vehicles, for instance, will soon negotiate the chaotic terrain of battlefields and disaster zones, making their own decisions while climbing out of ravines or driving over downed power poles.

We thought to talk with Vladimir Vantsevich, Ph.D., a specialist in vehicle design, as he gets set to host the UAB “agile vehicle” symposium Sept. 8-11, 2013, at the Hilton Birmingham Perimeter Park Hotel. The event will be the first to assemble experts in the specialty from around the world, and it will explore ground vehicle dynamics, energy efficiency and performance in severe environments.


Show notes for the podcast: 

1:17 Dr. Vantsevich earned his Ph.D. and Sc.D., the highest degree in the former U.S.S.R., from Belarusian National Technical University. Belarus is an independent country and home to several automotive design companies. In 1997, he received an assignment to work the deputy permanent representative from Belarus to as for the United Nations, where for the years he worked on issues related to the protection of intellectual property rights as part of the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology. After three and a half years there, he took a facutly position at Lawrence Technical University in Michigan, where he built automotive engineering programs for 11 years, before coming to UAB a year ago.

2:10  Dr. Vantsevich is a pioneer in the design of systems that distribute power between the wheels. What may seem like a technical detail has everything to with the ability of a passenger car to achieve traction on a wet road, not to mention its fuel efficiency

3:33 Dr. Vantsevich holds 30 certified inventions and is well known in the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, with most of his innovations concerned with slip differentials. A differential is a set of gears that enable wheels to rotate at different speeds as the engine applies power to them and as road conditions vary. When a car turns for instance, the wheel travelling around the outside of the turn must roll farther and faster than its counterpart on the inside. A limited slip differential is a gear arrangement that, in an off-road environment, senses when one wheel if off of the ground or has hit a patch of ice and transfers power to the wheels still in contact with the ground.

6:30 Alabama's reputation is growing internationally as a center for automotive engineering, and now is a great time to gather leaders in Birmingham to decide on next steps for the field. The symposium promises to have a positive impact on UAB and local automotive companies as well, potentially helping them to recruit talent to the area, Dr. Vantsevich said.

8:58 The symposium also focuses on dynamics, the study of what happens when you apply forces to a moving body, say a vehicle. What happens to a car when you combine the forces transmitted by the engine to the wheels with those applied by the wheels to the ground combined with a strong side wind?

12:14 Many ads about luxury cars talk about the "active safety features" available in new cars today.  Your car might issue a warning if you attempt to change lanes into space already occupied by another car.  It might tell you if you're about to back out of parking space into an oncoming car. Despite these wonders, there is still tremendous potential to improve these systems, Dr. Vantsevich said. To realize their potential will require researchers to develop theoretical and analytic foundations, the agile dynamic underpinnings of future systems. The symposium in Birmingham will launch some of those efforts.

14:48 There also may be value in creating unmanned vehicles that are autonomous, with no need for remote control as they go about their mission and stream intel back to headquarters. Such "ground drones" may save many soldiers lives, but only if they are capable of negotiating extreme terrain. If their mission requires them travel long distances, such vehicles must also be fuel efficient, and especially in the case of autonomous rovers deployed to the surface of Mars.

16:52  Furthermore, such unmanned vehicles would often have a "mission-related payload," like a robotic arm on top. Experts in mechatronics would have to consider how the weight and motion of the arm changed the agile vehicle dynamics and performance.as a rover drove up a steep slope.

18:54 While cars started out as mechanical systems, like wind up clocks based gears and mechanisms but no electricity, they have become something else, said Dr. Vantsevich. Cars today might have five computers, which is more than the space shuttle had. The interplay between mechanical, computer and electrical systems of any device, from a smart phone to a car, is the province of mechatronics. It's not just a combination of separate mechanical, electronic and computer systems, but an approach where different sets of physics become one.

23:55 In recent years, car designers have added many electronic devices to cars in seeking to improve their performance and fuel efficiency. An unintended result is that today's car has two kilometers of wires running though it that together weigh 30 kilograms. That weight that costs the car in fuel efficiency and handling, and mechatronics-minded engineers are seeking to reduce that burden.

28:02 Dr. Vantsevich seeks to develop a world class program in mechatronics at UAB, which will include courses at the bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. level. Newly offered courses include "introduction to mechatronics, design of robots and design of hybrid vehicles, the latter in partnership with The Southern Company. As electricity producers, power companies like The Southern Company have taken an interest in charging stations for electric cars and in the cars themselves.

29:07  The symposium starts on Sept. 8 and is formally titled The Agile Ground Vehicle Dynamics Energy Efficiency and Performance in Severe Environments International Engineering Symposium. It will be hosted by the UAB School of Engineering and Department of Mechanical Engineering, Barber Motorsports, Southern Company, the Birmingham Chapter of American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the International Society for Terrain Vehicle Systems.
                                                    
Speakers will include:

• Thomas Gillespie of Mechanical Simulation Corp.
• Japan’s Masato Abe of Kanagawa Institute of Technology; 
• Donald Margolis of University of California, Davis; 
• Jianbo Lu of Ford Motor Company; 
• Delbert Tesar of University of Texas, Austin
• Lev Barakhtanov of Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University and others.

Other symposium participants will include Ford Motor Company, General Motors, John Deere and Volvo.
Conference registration is $250 for students and professionals from developing countries, $550 for professionals and $750 for exhibitors. Registration discounts are available to local companies and academic institutions. UAB students, faculty and staff may attend workshops at no cost, but must pay to attend the banquet. For more information, contact Dr. Vantsevich at vantsevi@uab.edu or 205-975-5855.

3D printing: bones, buildings and burgers

I first saw 3D printing at work in the movie Mission Impossible II starring Tom Cruise, which debuted 13 years ago. It seemed like at every turn, some spy was printing out a life-like 3D facial mask to impersonate his enemies.

Action flicks tend to preview near-future technologies, and 3D printing has gone from science fiction to an over-hyped but cutting edge research area since MI 2. The printers in question print 3D objects out of plastic or concrete instead of flat images on paper using ink. To show why the subject seems to have captured popular imagination, here is a short list of objects that may be printed in the near or distant future, according to recent articles:

• Replacement teeth, ears, skin, heart valves and fingers 
• Buildings (by teams of mobile printers)  
• Burgers and pizza on long space flights. 
• Robotic octopus suckers to help robots grip

Our guest for this podcast is Kenneth Sloan, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences within the UAB College of Arts and Sciences, and director of UAB’s 3D Print lab. As described in an article by UAB Magazine's Matt Windsor, 3D printing may have applications in areas as diverse as medical implants, gaming, archeology and crime fighting. As Dr. Sloan says, there may soon be a 3D printer in every kitchen, and available in designer colors, but who knows what we will use them for.

Show notes for the podcast

1:25 Instead of ink, one kind of 3D print head pushes out extremely thin layers of superheated material that instantly cool to hold a desired form. Most of the 3D printers at UAB lay down layers of melted plastic 1/100th of an inch thick. They then move the print head up a bit and do it again, until the 2D layers stack up into a 3D object.

2:27  A second kind of 3D printing cures material in layers. You start with a box full of powder, and the printer lays down liquid in layers that hardens the power in the desired pattern. What you end up with is a box full of powder, with the desired object inside of it.  You open the box, grab the object and shack of the lose, uncured powder.  Interestingly, since concrete is hardened by combining liquid with powder, this has enabled researcher to 3D print objects in concrete.

3:30 An important challenge in 3D printing is that engineers must often design and print out a framework right alongside the target object so that the object doesn't collapse have way through being printed.

4:13 3D printing technology has been available for 20 years, but the computational power is just arriving now to make it useful and available to all. The advent of cloud computing meant that most researchers can now afford to program complex combinations of objects and supporting frameworks. Otherwise, 3D printers are made of standard tinkerer elements like small electric motors, sprayers and heating elements that have been around since the 1950s.  

4:38 What makes 3D printing require computing power are the calculations about where to lay down solid material in space as you build the object in layers, as well as the translation of spatial relationships from a 3D model to a series of 2D slices.

6:05 For many years, engineers have looked at 3D graphical displays on computer screens when designing prototypes. They work through a series of rapid design changes for an invention, testing and rethinking versions along the way. 3D printing allows engineer to print out the object at each stage in rapid prototype design. They can test fit it against other parts of whatever they are creating. They can roll it around in their hands. 3D printing allows for the fast manufacture of quick, cheap, multiple versions of a prototype invention in plastic to solve problems before fabricating it from an expensive metal for instance.

7:03 3D printing enables the creation of complex objects that no other process can create. There are several examples on Dr. Sloan's website that you cannot take apart, and that you could not assemble out of pieces in the first place. By printing interlocking pieces in layers, the final product is made of moving pieces that cannot be assembled or dis-assembled.  Picture a door that is one solid piece with it hinges. The door swings on the hinges, but you can't remove the hinges. Fun examples of this kind of object include puzzles. Dr. Sloan mentioned that one MIT student had even designed a 3D-printed a Rubik Cube, a single, interlocking movable puzzle as opposed to the original, made of separate pieces that snapped together.

9:24 Plastic and concrete were the first materials used in 3D printers because they are easy to melt or harden quickly into durable materials. Plastic melts easily and can be shot through a print head. Concrete starts as a powder and object can be shaped by selectively getting it wet. The interesting thing is that any substance that meets either of these criteria might eventually be 3D printed, from ceramics to metal to glass to chocolate.

11:08  Dr. Sloan's original area of expertise was in computer graphics.  The field had delivered tremendous value to engineers by developing the capability to display 3D digital images of desired objects on computer screens. That said, researchers had long wished that they could cheaply 3D print digital designs. With every decade, a "zero has been chopped off the price" of 3D printers, and now most labs can afford one.

12:13 Beyond assembling equipment, Dr. Sloan has reached across UAB to offer a 3D printing service of sorts to researchers in many disciplines. With a main mission of educating students in 3D printing, his lab might have been satisfied with using "hobby level" printers, or with sending out big jobs to specialty "print farms."  By hatching collaborations across campus, he has been able to centralize equipment costs and expertise to offer more advanced 3D printing to many research efforts that couldn't do it alone.  By making this offer, his lab has enjoyed a steady flow of inquiries from researchers proposing to use 3D printing in wasy he never could have imagined. Meanwhile, his student now have unparalleled access to real world design projects.

Lamina cribrosa

14: 26 An example of an interesting, unexpected project was the 3D printing lab's collaboration with the UAB Department of Ophthalmology. The lab was able to 3-D print a computer model designed by eye researchers of part of the optic nerve, the lamina cribrosa, known malfunction in the development of glaucoma. Apparently, our eyes our sealed, with a certain pressure maintained inside. This is complicated by the need for the optic nerve to pass through the outer membrane of the eye as it carries information about images from the lens into the brain for processing. Making this possible is the lamina cribosa, a web-like mesh through which the optic nerve fibers can pass out of the eye without losing pressure. This feature of the anatomy is about two millimeters across, but Dr. Sloan's team was able to 3D print an eight-inch version. This enabled the research team to pick it up, look through it and roll it around in their hands for the first time. Since then, Dr. Sloan has watched as a series of eye researchers, including his wife, UAB anatomist, Christine Curcio, Ph.D., have picked up the model, spun it around and said,"...interesting, I never realized that XX."

16:59 Dr. Sloan also highlighted the ability of 3D printing to be useful to bioengineers seeking to design scaffolds. The body has an amazing ability to regrow skin, bone or muscle lost to injury or disease, but it often needs help. His lab is involved in current UAB research projects seeking to design of mats or scaffolds or weaves of material that act as a guide and support for tissue trying to grow back together in an orderly fashion. 3D printing may be especially useful in creating scaffolds out of biodegradable materials. That would enable surgeons to implant a scaffold that aids in tissue regeneration without requiring a second surgery to remove the scaffold later. It would simply dissolve about the time it was no longer needed. Dr. Sloan's lab has one printer that prints in a biodegradable, nontoxic material, and there has been a steady stream of researchers from the medical end seeking to build it into research projects.

18:32 3D printing will be valuable to regenerative medicine for the same reason it is useful in rapid prototyping. It lends itself to creating a single custom implant for each patient, versus technologies that require mass production of one-size-fit -all implants to break even.

19:32 Dr. Sloan believes that it will be possible in the next five years for biotechnicians to 3D print skin to cover wounds and burns, knee cartilage and heart valves. These are examples of the more straightforward, uniform tissue types that lend themselves to current 3D printing technologies. Unfortunately, he said there is also a great deal of hype surrounding 3D printing right now, and stories that predict the imminent arrival of printed, complex organs with intricate cellular structure are not realistic. These structures would require technologies that 3D print with a nanoscale resolution, and are still a long way off.

21:50 Beyond medicine, a recent article in Discover Magazine talked about how 3D printers may one day print out meals for future astronauts on long spaceflights. Dr. Sloan said burgers and pizza would be on the 3D printing menu, but not steak. The reason for this are the same ones that determine the field's ability to print out skin but not a brain. Burgers and pizza be printed out of somewhat homogeneous, simple materials that hold their form in layers as they are printed and then cooked. A pizza printer might have five printer cartridges that spew layered shapes that bake into a pizza. Steak is tissue, with a complex microstructure beyond the reach of current technologies.

24:40  Dr. Sloan this week attended the Inside 3D Printing Conference in Chicago, which included an exhibit of 30-foot high concrete sculptures made using 3D printers. He is currently seeking collaborations with artists and sculptors who wish to 3D print fantastical forms by curing concrete out of powder. Layer-by-layer printing may make possible the creation of interlocking, complex sculptures that would fall apart in mid-assembly if made any other way.

26:06 Moving from art to architecture, Dr. Sloan said he has seen reports of researchers experimenting with the idea of 3D-printed buildings. If one can print a 30 ft by 30 ft sculpture, it may be possible to print a 300 ft by 300 ft building. Furthermore, builders may one day dispatch a team of mobile robots with built-in 3D printers to assemble different parts of a building at the same time. The same idea goes for shooting robots to the moon that could mine local materials and and then 3-D print a moon base before the people even arrive. An advantage of large-scale 3D printing would be that you no longer have to build a structure out of pieces (nails, beams, etc.). That leaves the architect free to design any structure that will stand once complete.

28:23 Dr. Sloan hesitated to predict how we might use 3D printers in the future. He said he is old enough to remember when personal computers were just a pipe dream. As their advent approached, articles mistakenly predicted that we would use them to store our recipe files and to tell us what to make for dinner based on what was in the fridge. "Who knows how we will use 3D printers around the house?" If it gets cheap and useful enough, people will invent their uses for it.

Here are a few more, recent 3D printing articles from around the web:

New Scientist: Windows aims to open 3D printing to the masses

CNBC: How 3D printers are reshaping medicine

Time: Chicago 3D print shop open for business

The hard work of making cities smart and green

By 2050, 90 percent of Americans will live in cities that consume most of the nation's energy and generate most of its greenhouse gases. Whether sprawling cities devolve into ecological disasters or slowly transform into smart, sustainable economic growth engines will depend partly on the next generation of engineers and the technologies they invent.

To face the challenges posed by megalopolises, experts say Americans need to do more than just upgrade the current, rusting infrastructure. In a perfect world, future cities would boast advanced public transportation systems, renewable energy resources,"complete streets" and green roofs. Birmingham aspires to become such a place, with a new kind of UAB campus at its heart. Solar-powered electric vehicles would traverse its avenues passing facilities cooled in part by the breeze instead of fossil-fuel-burning air conditioning.

As a step toward this futuristic vision, Fouad H. Fouad, chair of the UAB Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering – and director of the UAB Sustainable Smart Cites Research Center – recently convened the second annual Sustainable Smart Cities Symposium. We thought the meeting made for a good occasion to ask him about related research frontiers. It's an exciting time, but there is still a long way to go, with progress slowed by economic hard times and the slow pace of technological development. When will U.S.-made solar panels, for instance, be cheap enough to compete with fossil-fuel-generated electricity?

For any city re-imagining itself as sustainable, the effort must start with investment in smart, green infrastructure – power, transportation and buildings, according to Dr. Fouad.

Power
On the frontiers of alternative power generation, Alabama Power is currently testing solar panels at 50 locations across the state. Unfortunately, Alabama is not windy enough for massive wind power projects using current technologies, but engineers continue to experiment with the viability of rooftop units.

Research is underway in UAB Mechanical Engineering on the next generation of solar cells, some of the work done in combination with Alabama Power, said Dr. Fouad. UAB Energy Management’s dream is to carpet the roofs of UAB’s buildings with solar panels but presently, projects would take 30 years to generate enough savings to pay for themselves – in part due to the relatively low utility rates in Alabama.

Transportation

Smart, green transportation systems are a major ingredient in future-looking cities, with related efforts seeking to create new street plans that favor non-motorized traffic, take advantage of biofuels and launch electric vehicle fleets.

In terms of city planning research, Fouad said his team is doing many studies on congestion management.  Dynamic signaling systems may make it possible to better route traffic to lessen traffic jams. Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, UAB recently joined the National Center for Transportation Performance and Management to conduct multi-disciplinary research on sustainable transportation infrastructure, economic competitiveness and safety.

Other concepts under investigation by UAB civil engineers include the "complete street," where city streets are designed to accommodate foot and bike traffic as much as motorized traffic. A UAB demonstration project is planned for 10th Avenue in combination with The Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham, said Dr. Fouad.

Under the heading of green fuels and vehicle fleets, the planning commission's partnering initiatives include Alabama Partners for Clean Air and the Alabama Clean Fuels Coalition. Recent related news includes the announcement by the City of Trussville that it's expanding its fleet of compressed natural gas vehicles and opening a CNG fueling station. Compressed natural gas is a fossil fuel substitute for gasoline that is more environmentally sound. CNG may also be mixed with biogas, produced from landfills or waste water, which doesn't increase the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere.

UAB Civil Engineering has a project underway in conjunction with the Jefferson County Transit Authority and the U.S. Federal Transit Administration to design and construct a prototype for a hydrogen fuel cell powered bus, which they hope could be the workhorse of new green public transportation fleets in Birmingham. The first vehicles should on the road later this summer, said Fouad. Such vehicles make electricity to power the car using hydrogen, and they give off nothing more than water vapor from the tailpipe. On the consumer front, Honda and Toyota are getting closer to producing hydrogen-powered cars that could be sold to consumers, but they will be costly to start.

Alabama Power is also experimenting with fleets powered by alternative energy sources, and to date has more than 100 electric vehicles and 50 charging installations. The UAB Department of Energy Management has purchased two electric cars that are charged entirely by solar panels, which offer them the chance to evaluate a grid-free transportation technology with no carbon footprint.

Buildings and bridges
The UAB Department of Materials Science & Engineering has great research strength in the design of green composite materials for building, Dr. Fouad said. Often such materials are made from recycled materials and are lightweight, stronger and less expensive to use. His smart cities center will be participating in the Alabama Composites Conference starting on June 18 in Birmingham.

UAB Civil Engineering is also designing materials for use in the building of next-generation, critical infrastructures like the highways and bridges. Dr. Fouad is an expert, for instance, in autoclave-aerated concrete, which is filled with air bubbles such that it requires one-fifth of the weight of classical concrete to create a material that is much stronger. Composed of 80 percent air, it promises to deliver huge savings to the industry while creating an air-bubble barrier in building materials that insulates the building against energy loss. The barrier of air within the concrete acts as thermal installation, reducing heating/air conditioning costs.

UAB civil engineers are also looking at what's next for materials used to make bridges. Along with bridge materials research, projects underway are studying "bridge way in motion" sensors that send messages continually about the structural health of bridges to ensure timely maintenance, not to mention alerting authorities when trucks breaking weight limit laws cross bridges.

Also maturing are research efforts to develop green roof technology, where plants grown in soil beds on roofs conserve energy and improve air quality as plants turn carbon dioxide generated by cars into oxygen. Green roof test beds are currently in place atop the Hulsey Center, the Business and Engineering Complex, Campbell Hall and Hill University Center at UAB. They limit water runoff into the storm water drains, pumping it back through the irrigation system, which keeps polluted water from running into area creeks and the Black Warrior River. The presence of plants and surrounding soil controls water evaporation in a way that creates a cooling effect. Combined with the moist soil, this helps drop temperatures and has resulted in a 20 to 25 percent savings in power bills.

Both the vegetative and white reflective roofs are perhaps 80 degrees cooler in the mid-day summertime than standard black roofs, which can literally be used to fry eggs. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management is interested in promoting the adoption of vegetative roofs across the state.  

Impact on health
One of the most exciting projects underway is a partnership between Civil Engineering and the UAB School of Medicine's Division of Preventive Medicine. Called the "Go-ing Forward Project," it seeks to determine how the condition of the "built environment" in a city - the streets, lighting, housing, sidewalks, etc., - impacts the health of city dwellers. UAB researchers are going door to door surveying residents to determine how various aspects of the built environment are impacting their lives. The project's emphasis is looking at how transportation options, urban design, infrastructure decay, safety and security, and housing conditions affect obesity. More than one third of the American population is obese.

From the layout of streets to the options available for exercise, to the quality of air and water and to the condition and upkeep of residences, the built environment exerts silent but significant influence on the likelihood that people will be obese. Of all the engineering factors correlated with negative health outcomes, housing conditions are the most closely tied to health impacts. The presence of mold and its impact on asthma, poor indoor air quality in private homes and certain pollutants (e.g. estrogen-related compounds) in drinking water are all hypothesized to contribute to obesity risk.

Looking for partners
It was no accident that Richard Michos - global vice president, Smarter Cities, from IBM, was invited to speak at Fouad's recent UAB Smart Sustainable Cities symposium. UAB and the City of Birmingham hope to partner with IBM, perhaps through its Smarter Cities Challenge. This competitive IBM grant program is in the process of awarding $50 million worth of technology to 100 cities around the globe. These grants are designed to address the wide range of financial and infrastructure challenges facing cities today. Fouad met with Michos and Mayor Bell while Michos was in Birmingham, with their discussion covering the potential for IBM doing an assessment of the city's greatest sustainability needs, which is expected to yield a report and contribute to an action plan.

Speaking of partnerships, the City of Birmingham and UAB took a step toward smarter, healthier and more sustainable development with the Feb. 27, 2013, signing of a memorandum of understanding to partner on projects such as energy efficiency and city planning that accounts for a more “livable” city. Pilot projects expected out of the partnership include research into new recycling systems and lighting systems downtown that use less energy, perhaps in partnership with IBM.

UAB is also discussing the idea of creating a master's program in Sustainable Smart Cities, which would move forward with contribution from the deans and leadership of several schools across UAB.

For those interested in more information, other good sources include the UAB sustainabiltiy page and My Green Birmingham.